Ex-Apple UI Designer Wants to 'Kill Math'

Ex-Apple designer Bret Victor wants to make math easier with his Kill Math project. Contrary to his project's name, he doesn't want to destroy math as much as reinvent math's user interface. He tells Fast Company Design:

"So I don't hate math per se; I hate its current representations. Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? It’s incredibly, ridiculously difficult. That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication -- the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface."

It's an intriguing prospect and one that could have interesting implications for the math world if he succeeds. Check out one sample of his work integrating UI and math in Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System, in the video below: